Night Street by Kristel Thornell

and occupying each particle of what she saw. Work. The other place.
    There was a problem, early on, a blockage. She had rushed. Rushing, she distracted herself by thinking about composition. She caught herself doing it, wasting mental energy, shackled to the named world. She was not seeing but naming—bathing box, water, sky—and in this way holding on to things, stuck in their net.
    She was on her own, studying under no teacher and sometimes, if this felt odd, she was able to summon Meldrum. That morning, she heard him bidding her to simplify, simplify, to forget her awareness of things.
    She closed her eyes, trying to relinquish it.
    Then gazed anew, cleanly at the view she was portraying and yes, found herself in the space of pure ocular sensation. She raised her palette and brush. Only the visual miracle of nature existed. Where last night she had climbed out of Arthur’s van, releasing that particular dream, now she gripped the hand of reality. She would not let go. She painted, speaking only the universal language of depiction, a scientist of the visible world—or perhaps, though this could never be said to Meldrum, some class of medium or mystic. The fine movements of her brush sewed her own fibres firmly to life.
    In the end, when she laid her brush down and finally invited words and the things they named back like reprimanded children from the other room, Clarice thought she had the proof of her diligence. She had transcribed the visible, some of it at least; there was some truth here. She showed the seascape to its reflection in the mirror she had made. There.
    The bathing box at the shoreline and everything suspended, nestled within a smoky haze. The brownish-olive cliff. A suggestion of the curve of the next bay. The water, nearly flat: pink, grey, white, blue. One sensed that the ocean was not senseless but a sentient, musing thing. The bathing box’s torn door was iron red. Across the expanse of water, beyond early morning’s cloudy drift, a softness of coastline.
    She hankered for salt on her skin, but it was not a day for swimming; it was cold and chaotic and her body too unrested. She packed up and took the path between shaggy, dispassionate gums, wattle and tea-trees. Concentration and clarity left her, now it was over, and she was gone to the dogs. The cart was even more unwieldy than before.
    She was panting when, at home, she sneaked a last anxious look at her canvas, which would take days to dry and become definitive, closed the shed door on it and resumed her second life as housemaid.
    They breakfasted on porridge and tea. Clarice gave Father his tonic, and dusted till she had to sit on the stairs to stifle an impulse to weep. She felt dilapidated—could she too, like her father, be afflicted with unsteady nerves? Was she meant to inherit this, along with the weak heart? She laughed sorrowfully.
    â€˜Clarice?’ Father called from the drawing room, where she had not yet collected his tray.
    Who else?
    â€˜I’m dusting,’ she replied, trying to sound as if she were a great distance away. She was never properly alone here.
    In the kitchen, the stove soon made the dismal, cold air hot. The Beaumaris house had witnessed her graceless transformation into a poor and usually reluctant housekeeper. Before Father’s retirement, they had enjoyed domestic help, or better, taken it for granted. Her parents were reserved when it came to talking about money, to talking about most things, really, but she gathered that their financial situation had been debilitated by copious medical expenses; they had both grown very reliant on doctors—Mum for her heart, Father for his nerves and arthritis. It was surely worse to have had and lost servants than never to have had the luxury. Growing up with it had ruined Clarice. She was a laughable cook, uninspired, incompetent, with no natural inclination. The vacancy of a kitchen.
    She lost track while Father’s beef tea custard